Draw Comics with Miss Lasko-Gross

Comic strips are some of the most simple and effective ways to tell stories, especially to kids. With such little text, the story is told primarily through illustrations and is generally humorous and fun.

Miss Lasko-Gross is an American comic creator known for her semi-autobiographical graphic novels Escape from Special and A Mess of Everything. Though a lot of her work is adult-oriented, her recent step into motherhood must have been somewhat of an influence when we asked her to collaborate with us on some comic book drawing fun for kids.

Miss used her talent and wit to lay out a few comic book scenes for Moomah readers. Each template is layed out with six panels, two filled in by Miss herself and the other four left blank to be completed by young aspiring illustrators. The challenge is to create and tell a story through illustration using only the six boxes. Think you can do it?

One fun activity is to complete the comics as a group. Choose four friends to work with, giving each person one of the templates below. Each person fills in one panel on their template before passing it on to the next person. The comics are continually exchanged, with each artist reading the story and deciding what happens next. The finished sheets are a compilation of the unique talents of everyone involved. Beautiful, goofy, serious, cartoony, realistic, stick figures, doodles and general weirdness.

GIVE IT A GO! CLICK THE TEMPLATES BELOW TO PRINT >>

WANT TO IMPROVE YOUR CARTOONING SKILLS?

Miss let us in on a few tips for drawing some great cartoons to include in your comic strips.

START by making a round shape for both the head and the body.

SPLIT the shape up into quarters which will act as facial guidelines.

SKETCH out the shape of the face so that the eyes are in even areas of the top two quarters, the nose falls in the middle, and the mouth lays toward the bottom.

SKETCH the body features out, with the arms coming off each side and hanging toward the middle line and the legs off to either side at the bottom.

ADD more detail to your sketches, making the lines more bold and drawing more specific details and images, such as patterns, eye lashes, hair and fingers.

ALLOW yourself to make changes to your drawing until you feel like it is looking right.

USE an eraser to remove the majority of the sketch lines, making the image stand out clear and bold.

BEGIN to fill in some of the drawing with color to start making it look more real and less sketched.

ADD some shadowing to your drawing. Shade in some areas of the face and arms to make the character look three-dimensional.

If you're thinking you want to start a bit more simple and need to work on your drawing skills before moving on to comic book cartooning, why not try Ed Emberly's drawing books. We had a go at them this summer and they were super simple and fun.